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Artist: Raphael Feuillatre
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Raphael Feuillatre:

Spanish Serenades

When Raphaël Feuillâtre was given the opportunity to play guitars owned by three of Spain’s finest composers, he jumped at the chance. For his second Deutsche Grammophon album, Spanish Serenades, he has created a programme built around works by Albéniz, Llobet and Tárrega, adding others by their compatriots Granados and Rodrigo. A talented and prolific arranger, Feuillâtre plays five of his own inventive transcriptions of works for solo piano. These include Granados’s Andaluza, which he performs with violinist and fellow DG artist María Dueñas. Spanish Serenades also features the French guitarist’s first recordings with orchestra – he is joined by the Verbier Festival Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Gábor Takács-Nagy, in Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez.

Through the generosity of several different collectors, Feuillâtre was lent guitars owned by Albéniz, Llobet and Tárrega for this recording, and began planning a tracklist by selecting works by these three influential figures of the Spanish classical world.
Known as the “Sarasate of the guitar”, Francisco Tárrega was a composer, arranger and teacher as well as virtuoso performer. Feuillâtre captures his legacy in the colourful Recuerdos de la Alhambra and Capricho árabe, together with eight of his ingenious preludes for guitar. 

Miguel Llobet, who studied with Tárrega, made history as the first classical guitarist to create an electric recording. As a composer, he is perhaps best-known for his harmonisations of Catalan folk songs, four of which feature on Spanish Serenades, as does his transcription of Danza triste. Melancólica from Granados’s Danzas españolas. 

Raphael Feuillatre:

Visages Baroques

“My first album for Deutsche Grammophon stems from a desire to share my love for Baroque music,” says rising-star French guitarist Raphaël Feuillâtre. Visages baroques, presents music by J.S. Bach and his French contemporaries Forqueray, Rameau, Royer and Duphly. The carefully curated programme translates works mostly conceived for solo harpsichord into the colourful soundworld of the guitar. They are performed by the first guitarist signed to DG in many years, an artist hailed as “a tremendously versatile and sensitive player” (Classical Guitar).

“The title Visages baroques (“Baroque Faces”) refers to the new aspect given to each work by its arrangement and to the different facets of the guitar highlighted by the diverse selection of music,” explains Feuillâtre, who also notes the valuable additions to the guitar repertoire represented by these transcriptions, several of them unpublished. The musicians behind them include his teachers Michel Grizard and Judicaël Perroy, fellow French guitarist Antoine Fougeray, and German guitarist Gerhard Reichenbach, as well as Feuillâtre himself.

Visages baroques features two large-scale works by Bach, the first of which is the Concerto in D major BWV 972, itself a transcription for harpsichord of a violin concerto from Vivaldi’s L’estro armonico. Judicaël Perroy’s arrangement preserves the sense of solo and accompanying strings and, adds Feuillâtre, “brings a brightness and a virtuosic, orchestral dimension to the programme”.